Adi Shankar broke in, blew up, spiraled, healed, then made Netflix’s weirdest show ever
polygon.comA 23-year-old Adi Shankar rolled into Los Angeles in 2009 without a clue of how to make movies or TV shows, but he did have comic book legend Todd McFarlane’s office number. So the scrappy Indian kid, fresh off quitting his job at Discover Card, rang McFarlane — over and over and over again until someone picked up. When McFarlane finally answered, Shankar didn’t mince words. “I told him everyone was a loser and I should be doing the Spawn movie,” Shankar recalls. McFarlane was … baffled. There was no way in hell he was granting some kid the rights to Spawn. But he agreed to meet Shankar for coffee, to maybe teach him a thing or two about breaking in. The budding filmmaker soaked up every word.
Shankar has never had a daydream he couldn’t manifest into some form of reality. While the producer’s most mainstream hit, Netflix’s animated series Castlevania, might seem like run-of-the-mill adaptation in the era of slapdash IP conversion, for Shankar it was another moment of calling his shot — and in that case, literally making it happen. “I showed up to Los Angeles and I wanted to make Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem, and Spawn,” he says of his early days of being a video game kid with big ideas. “Like, that’s it. I didn’t give a shit about anything else.”
Six years ago, the producer “wanted to make a fucking Batman movie without any adults around.” As with Spawn, the chances of DC granting him his literal wish were slim. So Shankar did it his way, piecing it together year after year. The Guardians of Justice, which quietly crept onto Netflix on March 1, is not technically a Batman movie, but it does star one of Shankar’s idols, three-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page, as Knight Hawk, a gravelly, cowl-wearing
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